‘Now, Bella, let’s talk,’ says the Angel. ‘Let’s go through the factors that make it essential that you do as I ask. Something very strange is happening. The man you call Brown, the dictator of Zanj, as we know, was until recently retired in the South of France, where he has lived since his overthrow. Without family as far as I know, without friends. In all that time he’s not been heard of. He dropped out of sight, went underground, disappeared. I suspect the politics from which he emerged makes it essential that he keeps his head down. If you spend a good deal of time murdering your opponents and stripping bare the treasury of your country, then I suppose there are always going to be those who wish to complain.
‘Well, all of a sudden, out of his hidey-hole he pops, he takes off one day and comes here, to La Frisette. Why, and more to the point, why now? What does he want? We know that Paris know that he’s here because it is undoubtedly they who have effectively commandeered the Priory Hotel where dear André plays the unwilling host to the Redeemer. Paris have also supplied a guard. Which means that they must worry about his safety. Paris also know, and would prefer to keep quiet, the links between this Redeemer Brown and your Papa. We know something happened out in Zanj and we know it’s something that our government wants to conceal. Remember that they were sufficiently worried to move in on you and your mother after your father’s death; as you pointed out, they forced the sale of your apartment, they took your mother’s jewels. And here I have to point out that we must remember that diamonds are one of the few treasures of the curious country of Zanj. The clear implication of all this is that this man had some hold on your father, perhaps some unpaid debt. And now maybe he’s run out of money. So he comes here, looking for the family. He wants something, Bella. You must find out what it is.’
‘And then?’
‘Then we can fight him,’ says Father Duval. ‘The patron has plans.’
I have returned to the Priory to find out why he is here. Not for the Angel, but for my own sake. I’ve taken the precaution of dressing carefully for the part I’m to play: the innocent enquirer. I’m wearing a dress of blush-pink velvet with a low neck, flat white shoes, and my hair is elaborate but chic. It’s a style damn difficult to fix on your own; first it has to be spritzed then scrunched, moussed and dried naturally, and finished with a little wax rubbed through it for control. Two tortoiseshell combs complete the effect. It took all of an hour with Uncle Claude and the Angel muttering impatiently downstairs while they waited to drive me to the Priory. It was only when we got to the Priory that I remembered Clovis, upstairs in Uncle Claude’s den.
‘I locked him inside,’ says Uncle Claude.
‘He won’t come to any harm,’ the Angel promises as I leave the car. ‘Father Duval is standing guard.’
André shows little surprise when I tell him what I know about Monsieur Brown.
‘They may plan to fight the Redeemer,’ André says solemnly, ‘but first they want to finish with me. Have you seen this?’
He holds up a copy of La Liberté, the house organ of the Parti National Populaire, and with a trembling finger he points to an unsigned editorial:
a strange perfume from
the garden of the carthusians?
… A troubling, foreign and unhealthy cosmopolitanism has begun to invade the precincts of our dear village. Not only do strangers from abroad find it increasingly easy to take up employment in the local industries, such as the nougat factory, thus depriving native-born Frenchmen of their rights of employment, but there now comes from the garden of the Carthusians a most provocative scent, a perfume androgynous, unhealthy and, moreover, one which would not be recognised by the good fathers who once inhabited the holy house by the lakeside. The present Prior of this establishment has a somewhat unusual taste in novices, or acolytes, a band of mendicants drawn from the lesser suburbs of Lyons, who together practise a brand of heresy which once drew down on its protagonists the cleansing fires of the stake …
‘It’s sad, Bella. The old cures for sin and suffering are not available any more. This ancient monastery, once the house of Carthusians, had its little punishments, its flagellations, its mortifications, its routes to salvation. All off limits to us now. You know the story of St Benedict, who founded the Cistercian Order? It was said that he was very troubled by lust and when his lust became apparent in company –’
‘Do you mean he had an erection?’
‘Yes. He cured himself of it by jumping into a bed of nettles. It never troubled him again. The simplicity of the very holy ones is quite frightening, isn’t it? Everything final seems too easy. After all,’ – his smile is awful – ‘it’s not the fault of the dear boys who come to work for me in the summer – all the way from Lyons. They’re good boys …’
I can’t resist it, I say: ‘I’m glad some good comes out of Lyons.’
‘So you know my family story? Your grandmother has told you about our branch in Lyons?’
I nod. ‘You should have told me yourself. I wouldn’t have blamed you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it wasn’t your fault.’
André’s eyes roll and he begins to tear the newspaper.
‘When a child discovers his inheritance is a death sentence, he must go on living under it! And he must live on it! Won’t you even allow me to feel pain? To refuse to help those who suffer is never kind, but to refuse to allow someone to suffer! – Bella, is that why you’ve come, to bait the bear?’
‘I’d like to see Monsieur Brown. If he’ll see me.’
‘Of course. He’s always willing to see you. I think that’s why the men at the gate let you in without a challenge. It’s a funny thing, Bella, but I would say that you are continually expected.’
André throws the bits of newspaper into the air and the little scraps rain down on us.
And certainly he does seem to be expecting me because my soft knock on the door of his cell is answered instantly. He is dressed in red shirt and green trousers and carries a copy of the autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, it’s a book in a loud red cover. On the table beside his bed is a tin of drinking chocolate with a picture of La Belle Chocolatière carrying her tray of drinking chocolate, a lovely homely picture of a plump pretty girl in cap and apron who comes bearing her hot, dark, sweet, blissful sleeping draught in just the way my grandmother would carry it to me each night in bed in the days before my father died and my mother fled, before my doll Gloria was kidnapped, before my uncle broke my mug with the intelligent bear being led by the fat man, a picture in which all the beastliness seemed concentrated in the man.
‘Still with those funny earphones on, still listening to your music. What is it this time?’
I give him the earphones.
‘Who are they – witches?’
Actually it’s that three-woman group Vulpine who made it big with ‘Trauma’, last year sometime – they all wear blonde wigs and black leather, bicycle-chain belts. The usual S & M lookalikes. They’re a gothic triad, a middle- to heavyweight metallic lot who fell out of the air somewhere above Ealing last winter, like space debris, and made a bit of a splash when they came down.
‘This is the barbarism of the West,’ Monsieur Brown says. ‘Doesn’t this noise make it difficult for you to hear what people are saying?’
‘That’s the idea. Have you started making yourself hot chocolate in the evenings? I see that La Belle Chocolatière keeps you company.’
He smiles. ‘No, the tin is empty. But the dear proprietor, for whom my every whim is his command, as he often tells me, seeing that I admired the portrait of the girl with the tray, gave it to me. But I can see you know her. Who is she, please?’
‘She lived quite a time ago. She’s known as La Belle Chocolatière and she was a real person, Anna Baltauf, a girl who worked in a chocolate house in Vienna. Each day the Prince came down to the chocolate house because he loved the liquid o
f the gods, the fashionable new drink, and he fell in love with the waitress Anna who served him and he carried her off and married her. For a wedding present he had her painted in the same uniform she had worn when she was just a humble chocolate server.’
‘She is …’ he searched for the word, ‘just right. Beautiful.’
I look at La Belle Chocolatière and I see that what makes for beauty is the yoking together of unlikely things that suddenly become appropriate. To make them seem as if they could never have been otherwise. To create necessity from the elements of chance meetings. The union of the most unlikely is brilliantly vindicated. Sense and necessity are born.
‘It’s a chocolate fairytale!’ He claps his hands like a child. ‘A marriage born of the sacred bean. If I were in Zanj tomorrow I would have someone painted like the girl on the chocolate tin.’
‘Which wife would you use?’
He doesn’t answer, just gives me his big, slow smile and sits me down on the little green chaise longue. ‘Now you must tell me why you’ve come to see me. Is there something I can do for you?’
I look at him then, this solid, dark slab of a man with his wide, turned-down mouth, the waxy ridges of jaw bone, the corduroy quality of his skin close up, the flapping ears and the heavy jowls. Behind him is a photograph of him in all his glory. No doubt another portrait taken by delayed-action camera. And he is so ridiculous in this picture, in his white uniform blazing with medals like hub-caps, and braid, epaulettes and insignia, a broad snowy belt studded with jewels around his plump middle, the peaked cap crazed with gold; here are the familiar heavy round harsh black glasses, and behold also he carries a thick wand, or a baton, or a club, or maybe a truncheon, of midnight blue flecked with silver stars held up before him in his hand, neat in a white glove. This is the man who killed and ate his enemies. Kept them in the fridge. I should be frightened. I want to be frightened. But I’m not. All I want to know is – did he cook them first? Before he served them up with rice? I take off the diamond pendant Papa gave me and hand it to him.
‘Why are you giving me this?’
‘Because I think it belongs to you.’
‘It doesn’t. It’s yours.’
‘Yes, Papa gave it to me. But you gave it to him, didn’t you? All the jewels he gave to me and my mother came from you. The stones of the Wouff.’
‘Gifts. It’s a custom among my people, the people of the stone.’
‘Gifts for favours. Bribes.’
‘There’s no such word in our language. Besides, these stones for us are not what you regard them as: treasures, valuables. They’re the sacred signs of our gods and they represent marks of friendship and affection that we felt, your father and me. Freely passed, freely accepted. Given like promises. Why do you want to return it to me now?’
‘After my father died the men from the government in Paris came to see us and they took all the diamonds and jewels away from my mother. All except this one. So I want you to take it because I feel it’s yours. It doesn’t belong to me. Please, we have enough trouble here. My grandmama is very ill.’
‘You believe that this is why I came? You give me the diamond because you hope I’ll take it and leave?’ Very gently, he takes the pendant and replaces it around my neck.
‘Ah, no, my dear. I will go – but not yet. Keep it. One day you might be glad. It’s a special stone. Only certain people may wear it.’
‘I don’t think you understand. My uncle and the Angel and Father Duval – they’re powerful men. My uncle’s the mayor and Monsieur Cherubini runs him like clockwork. They have a new party, the PNP, which many people in the village belong to, and the police chief too. And they’re keen to begin to stir things up.’
‘My compliments. You have important tribal relations.’
‘There’s a big rally on Saturday.’
‘And you wish to invite me? Very well, I will come.’
‘There will be trouble. You must get out.’
‘You worry for me! You are a good girl.’
‘Please.’
‘My dear young miss, it is you who don’t understand. This is not something I can decide myself. Those men out there in the parking lot – why do you think they watch me day and night?’
‘For your protection. Because you have enemies.’
‘Yes. But also so that I should not slip away and never be seen again. So that I shouldn’t run home to my own country where my people cry for me. I hear their voices on the wind –’ He cocks an ear to the silent, velvet night beyond the windows. ‘Come home, Redeemer! – they cry – Save us from the tyrant … I hear their cry but I cannot reply. Believe me, if the door stood open I would fly tomorrow. Tonight. This second! But the watchers are ready. I do not move without their knowledge. You see how I am in this place. They chose it, took it over for me because of its position. A fine place to imprison a man, an easy place to guard, no access except by the little lake road, the water before, the mountains behind …’
‘There might be a way.’
‘Can you see such a way? They have patrols on the autoroutes outside the village, people standing by to catch me at the airports. Yet if I could get out then they would have trouble stopping me, this I know, because people don’t recognise people they are not expecting to see. I would glide by them like a ghost. If, and I say if, I could get away … If I had help, a friend, a guide …’
‘By water,’ I hear myself say, ‘that’s the only route. Late at night, tomorrow night, Friday. That would be the time.’
‘But how do I get clear of the village? The lake, yes, possibly, to escape from the Priory. But how to get from the village thereafter?’
‘You don’t, not immediately. You wait, hide, until Saturday morning when the rally begins and when everyone is fully occupied. The entire village is expected to turn out. No one’s allowed to park in the square, so there will be motor cars all over the village, unattended, available. You understand?’
‘Such consternation when they find me gone! The scandal!’
‘Monsieur Brown, if we do this properly there will be no consternation. No one will know you’ve left the hotel. You will spend Friday night quietly in some hiding place and then when the rally gets underway, you disappear.’
‘Where will you hide a person of my prominence?’
‘Leave that to me. Come down to the private beach tomorrow night, at two in the morning exactly. Don’t bring much – just what you’re standing up in.’
‘And a song on my lips, hope in my heart and my people’s voices ringing in my ears!’
He takes up a position in front of his picture, the one with the wand and all the medals, and he beams like crazy. I think in his own mind he’s already back in Zanj, back in his uniform. Back getting ready to chew up some opponents? Well, I don’t ask that question. You appreciate my diffidence, it’s not easy suddenly to turn round and ask someone if he eats people. You need to nudge the conversation along. And anyway, what do I say if he says ‘yes’? Between the two of us, I think I’d be even more worried if he said ‘no’.
‘May I paint you?’
‘What?’ For a moment I don’t understand because he has a camera in his hands, one of those cameras which gives you prints immediately and he’s examining me through the viewfinder as I sit on his little green settee.
‘Something to remember you by. Something to take away with me. The daughter of my friend whom I have travelled so far to see. My rescuer!’
‘We haven’t done it yet.’
‘I have faith. Please, just one picture. Let me arrange you. Excuse me but you seem to have newspaper in your hair. May I remove it? What lovely pins! There!’
So he arranges me. I have a little pillow behind my head and I sit on the edge of the settee with my left knee raised. Very gently he takes the right shoulder of my dress and pulls it down, baring my arm and showing the pendant ar
ound my neck. Then he goes over to the fire and lights it. He gives me a mirror to hold and I look at myself, glad to see I am still there, still in one piece. Once the fire is blazing he sets the camera on automatic and crouches in front of the flames with his back to me. He takes several pictures before he’s satisfied. He constantly feeds the fire. The room becomes terribly hot, I can feel the flames playing along my legs, I have beads of sweat on my lip and forehead. His red shirt is the colour of the flames crackling in the grate.
Afterwards he shows me the original. A picture torn from a magazine.
‘Les Beaux Jours’. I like the title,’ says Monsieur Brown. ‘And I recognise you in the picture.’
‘But her hair is redder than mine and I think she’s quite a bit shorter. She’s wearing a pearl necklace, not a pendant. It isn’t me.’
‘It is now,’ he says.
I am walking through the darkened cloisters of the Priory towards the front door, after leaving him, and the whole place is deathly quiet, the guests asleep, André absent. Then, in the dark of the Prior’s garden, through the glass walls, I see him lying by the well, beneath the virgin who examines the foot of the Christ child. Clovis. Out for the count, stoked to the eyeballs. Has he been taking Chinese heroin or durophet or LSD or the whole damn caboodle? I can’t say, but he is out cold. He’s become again the old shooting, popping, sniffing Clovis, stoned out of his unstable little mind. Where is the new Clovis of the salmon-pink overall and the perspex boot, full of life and high hopes? My first thought is to wonder how on earth he got past the watchers at the gate who would let no one in. But then I guess Clovis was so high he was flying and simply soared over their heads, Mercury, the messenger of the gods, only he wasn’t wearing a funny hat like a golf cap, which Monsieur Brown wore when he played Mercury in the painting. Clovis just wears his hair as green as Ireland and is lying now on the ground as if he’s dead, or has given up all hopes of life and happiness.
My Chocolate Redeemer Page 19